In 2018 the company successfully supported twenty-eight team members in gaining their professional tax associate qualifications through their training programme. 

 

Simon Brown, the managing director and founder of ForrestBrown, said: "We take great pride in investing in our people and are therefore delighted to be expanding our team in 2019. Our associate training programme has proven to be a great success, and I look forward to adding more trainees to our ranks. With this in mind, we are currently looking to move offices in Bristol to ensure we have the space to accommodate our growing team.  

 

"I am really proud of our success in the last year. We love helping our clients grow, and so delivering £100m for them to invest back into their innovation this year is incredibly rewarding. At the same time, we’ve doubled the size of our team and won Taxation’s prestigious ‘best independent consultancy firm’ in recognition of our technical excellence and client service."

 

Source: Insider Media – South West

 

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A major increase in staff numbers, such as ForrestBrown is hoping to achieve with their almost 50% staff increase goal, can cause unforeseen problems for HR, admin and accounts job tasks if the company’s method of recording time worked has not yet been brought into the 21st century. 

 

Let’s take the most old-fashioned form of attendance management: the paper timesheet. 

 

It is very easy for staff to fill in timesheets incorrectly. Sometimes this can be deliberate time fraud, but sometimes it is just new staff getting confused, or people forgetting to fill in their timesheets until a week later, by which time they’ve forgotten their exact shift details and are likely to just fudge it. 

 

Even if the details are all correct, most paper timesheets must then be manually transferred to a database (usually an Excel spreadsheet) before being sent to payroll software. 

 

There are many opportunities for human error to kick in during this time-consuming process – e.g. making an unrecognised typo in entering, or misreading employee’s handwriting (1 or 7? O or 0 or D?). This can result in incorrect payslips. 

 

Incorrect data can also foul up HR tasks too, making it much more difficult to spot issues like adherence to the Working Time Directive or someone taking three 30 minute breaks plus lunch.

 

At Time and Attendance Southern, we offer specialised attendance management software which can work either with smartcards or with biometrics.